There's no defense for a history of sexual abuse

It has been close to a year since former Penn State University assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was convicted in Centre County court of sexually abusing 10 boys over the course of 15 years.

He had allegedly culled many of his victims from his now-defunct Second Mile charity for disadvantaged youth that the ex-assistant football coach ran out of a Penn State University locker room office.

University officials had allowed Sandusky to operate in that space even after his early retirement at age 55 in 1999 following a complaint from a mother about Sandusky showering with her son.

According to a report from former FBI Director Louis Freeh whose firm was hired by Penn State trustees in 2011 to investigate how university officials handled sexual abuse allegations against Sandusky, vice president Gary Schultz expressed concern about the mother’s complaint opening a “Pandora’s box.”

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The Freeh report concluded that university officials were aware of sexual abuse allegations against Sandusky for at least 14 years and still gave him access to campus. They did not report him to child welfare authorities even after they finally kicked him off campus in 2001 upon learning of a locker room assault witnessed by a graduate assistant.

Shortly after Sandusky was arrested in November 2011 as a result of a Pennsylvania grand jury investigation, Schultz was fired along with Penn State president Graham Spanier, athletic director Timothy Curley and the now-late legendary football coach Joe Paterno.

Spanier, Curley and Schultz have all been charged with obstruction of justice. Their lawyers maintain the former Penn State administrators are innocent. University officials have agreed to substantial NCAA penalties because of Sandusky’s sexual abuse of minors on campus.

There have been changes made at Penn State apparently designed to prevent future abuse, according to university trustees recently interviewed by an Associated Press reporter.

“There’s a lot of inaccurate information and negative information that’s out there and ... I want to make sure that we promote and discuss all the good things that have been done and we’re doing,” said board chairman Keith Masser.

His defensive attitude brings to mind that of the hierarchy in the Roman Catholic Church when decades of sexual abuse of minors by priests first started coming to light in 2002 after a Boston cleric was convicted of child molestation.

Church officials accused the members of the press of having a vendetta against the Roman Catholic Church because they reported the abuse allegations. In the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, sexual abuse allegations did not start being taken seriously until — as in the Sandusky case — a grand jury investigation was launched. In 2005, the grand jury report revealed that more than 60 priests allegedly assaulted children over six decades and none were turned over to police. It wasn’t until a second grand jury report, released in 2011, that arrests were made. A former priest pled guilty to sexually abusing an altar boy and another priest and a former male lay teacher were convicted of assaulting the same boy.

Yet another priest, the Rev. Monsignor William Lynn, was arrested for endangering the welfare of that altar boy because, when he was secretary for the clergy. Lynn knew one of the boy’s assailants was a suspected predator before that priest was assigned to the boy’s parish.

Coincidentally enough, Lynn was convicted just hours before Sandusky last June 22. Both have appealed their convictions.

Like Penn State officials, archdiocesan officials maintain that the changes they have enacted since the clerical sexual abuse scandal broke, will protect children from future victimization. Church officials also maintain they have instituted a more thorough process for ferreting out these offenders although it took a second grand jury report to convince them that they still had offenders working in their parishes.

Meanwhile, the number of young men who say they were abused by Sandusky has grown to about 30. In their search for justice, some have filed lawsuits, but not all. Money will clearly never negate the violation committed against them by someone they so deeply trusted.

Certainly the last thing sexual abuse victims need to hear are complaints about negative publicity generated by their assaults, from the people who failed to protect them.